So systematic 'cheating' may have been going on for some considerable time in
the higher echelons of domestic and international rugby. Of course it has,
everybody knows that!

Cheating in all its forms is absolutely integral to elite rugby. A great but hideously complicated game played under way too many stifling laws by largely intelligent and increasingly ruthless athletes.

The manifest but often unspoken truth is that rugby, more than almost any game, is open to abuse. Cheats can definitely prosper. And when you take that to the 9th degree you get obscene incidents such as Bloodgate and I suspect a fair few more like it although retrospective proof will be impossible.

You hear conversations and complaints – mainly good natured but depressingly resigned and accepting nonetheless – to that effect every weekend on touchlines around the country. It's an absolute 'given' within the game.

Of course being rugby, it is dressed up a bit with a kitbag full of euphemisms and normalised with large dashes of humour which all suggest a quasi-acceptance. But the subject of cheating – breaking and/or bending the rules – dominates many lively post-match inquests at the bar. And press conferences for that matter. For too long now we have chosen to view the game we love through a Nelsonian eye.

There are – pause for the customary knowing chuckle and shrug of the shoulders – the so-called 'black' arts of the front row, not to mention 'canny' gamesmanship and ' getting your retaliation in first'.

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Many goalkickers, as a matter of course, nick a couple of yards for long-range efforts, shirt-tugging is rife as is blatant obstruction and lazy runners, hands in the ruck, preventing release, gouging, scraping, handbagging, offside, deliberate knock on, not straight. And so on. And that before you even get onto the thorny subject of replacements, players being told to "Go down" and blood substitutes.

It's an insidious process. I remember back in November 2005 when Austin Healey, helping out for the Beeb, correctly identified three instances of cheating – blocking, crossing and entering a ruck from an offside position – by the All Blacks in a 15-second passage of play against England. Naturally not one was spotted or blown for.

"And you wonder why they are the best team in the world" was Austin's telling punchline if memory serves. Earlier this month the Sydney Morning Herald examined footage and published pictures of six alleged offences – cheating the laws – from New Zealand captain Richie McCaw that all went unpunished.

Cast your mind back over seven years and Dean Richards' refusal, as the then Leicester coach, to castigate Neil Back in any way for his blatant "hand of God" cheating at the death in the Heineken Cup Final at the Millennium Stadium. Leicester would probably have won that day anyway but I remember feeling distinctly uneasy at Richards' casually brushing aside of such cheating on that occasion. The alarm bells were ringing loudly. Or they should have been.

Cast your mind back to 1978 and Andy Haden's infamous dive to con Wales out of victory. Looking on at the time I could never understand why rugby decided to consign the incident to folklore and make a lovable pantomime villain out of Haden – and indeed Frank Oliver who tried the same ploy – rather than to ban them and declare the result null and void. It sent out some pretty strange messages.

Rugby and cheating go together. When the latest raft of IRB law changes arrive every season top club coaches will first spend a day ascertaining how the law is meant to work and then spend the rest of the week working out how to break or circumnavigate the new law. You sometimes wonder if a coherent and fluent game without cheating is possible although thankfully the British and Irish Lions proved conclusively otherwise earlier this summer, for which we give thanks. They did ultimately lose the series mind.

It is against this ingrained culture that Harlequins actions have to be viewed. What went on against Leinster and in the cover up has ensued was unfortunately inevitable given prevailing attitudes. Nasty, shocking, reprehensible, almost comical but alas predictable.

Rugby's extraordinary, almost unworkable laws, are a red rag to a bull to some of the rampant egos and clever clogs that populate the game. There are too many ways to get circumnavigate the laws and they are too open to interpretation, both by players and Referees. Cheating has become endemic, dare onesay necessary. Certainly many coaches would argue the latter. The others do it, so you have to follow suit or lose badly.

Historically the abundant common sense of 'rugby man' – usually as sound a character as you will find anywhere – has kept everything under control but the pressures of professionalism has seen that fail-safe all but destroyed. The game has lost its moral compass and badly needs to get back on course, pdq. All sorts of action can be recommended but above all rugby needs to address the small but everyday incidents of cheating – identify and punish them heavily – that have become part and parcel of the modern game.